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March 23, 2015

I'm really excited to announce that my new film "Echoes" will have the first USA screening at the 22nd Chicago Underground Film Festival alongside "Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal & A Whore" by Khavn de la Cruz (Philippines) at the opening night screening at 6 PM on Wednesday, May 13 at the Logan Theatre.

Founded in 1993, The Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF) is a year-round organization dedicated to the work of film and video makers with defiantly independent visions. Unlike many other “independent” film events their goal is not to imitate old guard, market-driven events such as Sundance but instead to focus on the artistic, aesthetic and fun side of independent filmmaking. CUFF promotes works that dissent radically in form, content and technique from both the tired conventions of Hollywood and the increasingly stagnant IndieWood mainstream.

March 20, 2015

My new film, "Echoes", will have it's world premiere at the núna (now) Iceland / Canada Art Convergence alongside Erika Macpherson's "Heimþrá (In Thrall to Home)" and Julia Ryckman's "Fleeting" a music video for her project Slattern. Original music by Christine Fellows and John K. Samson will be performed at the event.

The films will screen on the opening night of the festival on Friday, April 17, 2015, 7 pm at the Winnipeg Art Gallery's Muriel Richardson Auditorium and is free admission! More details here.

Structured around the recollection of a premonitory dream, fragmented memories from the period leading up to the death of my mother were projected on to natural textures and surfaces, re-photographed, composited and processed until the memories became abstracted representations of the evolution, degradation and disintegration of memory and the physical self.﻿ "Echoes" was shot in Iceland in 2011 during núna (now)’s 5th anniversary programming in Reykjavík﻿﻿.

During the second week of the festival, Ghost Twin, my electronic music project with my wife Karen will also perform alongside Slattern and Dj Flugvél Og Geimskip (Airplane & Spaceship) of Iceland, at the Good Will Social Club on Friday, April 24, 2015 at 10pm. More details on núna (now)'s website.

Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America's largest documentary film festival, conference and market, held annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 2013 edition of the Festival runs from April 25 to May 5.

Shot in one take on a single roll of Super 8 and using found audio of answering machine messages, Citizens Against Basswood is an amusing record of a man’s dogged attempt to petition against the plan to plant trees in his neighbourhood. By voicing the sentiments of fellow residents, he offers multiple takes on his civic responsibility. - Jane Kim

November 12, 2012

The Commons is proud to present the exhibition The Magus. Curated by Noam Gonick, this project brings together C. Graham Asmundson's paintings, drawings and works in yarn with The Magus, 2011, a film work by his son Jaimz Asmundson
which documents his father's artistic process. Seen here together for
the first time, it is a focused glimpse into their unique creative and
intergenerational collaboration. The exhibition will open Friday, November 23, 2012 and running until Sunday, January 6, 2013.

C. Graham Asmundson received a MFA from the Concordia
University and has been a prominent artist and cultural worker in Winnipeg
for many years, though rarely exhibiting outside his home community.
His son Jaimz Asmundson
is an experimental filmmaker, video artist, and electronic musician. They recently collaborated on The Magus,
2011, Jaimz’ groundbreaking documentary about his father's transcendent
art practice. Graham's works create allegorical fields of figures at
times mystical, often playfully queer and insurrectionary. Jaimz uses
film, video and animation techniques to penetrate deeply into his
father’s unusual process whereby random impulses, channeled from the
supernatural world, guide the artist while in a trance state. His bold
art making has often been the centre of controversy, including the Plug
In Gallery, Winnipeg, billboard project Homophobia is Killing Us,
1991, which was defaced by the Ku Klux Klan, leading to death threats.
Jaimz Asmundson has exhibited in numerous festivals and gallery
contexts. Selected screenings for
The Magus include FIFA - Festival
International du Films sur l’Art (Montreal), Hong Kong International
Film Festival, MIX NY and Lume International Film Festival (Brazil) –
Artistic Contribution Award.

The opening reception will be preceded by a conversation with
curator Noam Gonick and Jaimz and C. Graham Asmundson at 7pm in the
exhibition.

Also at this time Lance Blomgren’s will present Corner Pieces: Texts for Loitering. As
part of his ongoing series of public posters he has produced short
texts written for and to be posted in the immediate environs of The Commons.
Undermining the impersonal, public tone of the urban poster with an
openly subjective, mundane and seemingly meaningless series of
observations and histories, Texts for Loitering
offers a contemplative or dumbfounding moment for local passersby and
wanderers, hustlers and flâneurs. These posters function as an
associative intervention, addressing both the reader and site itself,
and work to implicate the reader in his or her own role within the
larger relational—and often celebratory—flow of events in the
neighbourhood.

Lance Blomgren’s text projects have been exhibited in Banff, Chicago, Berlin, and most recently as part of Magnetic Norths (Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal). He is the author of the novella Walkups, and Corner Pieces, both published by Conundrum Press. Blomgren is a MA candidate in Curatorial Studies program at UBC.

The Commons is a venue for the presentation of art in
all of its forms. In this way The Commons means to be a place where
disciplines meet and mix, a place for cross fertilization and dialogue.
The Commons facilitates the presentation of international art in
Vancouver through collaboration with galleries from around the world and
seeks to foster new economies for local artists through our exhibition
program.

This is a new age (for New Age-ism). INCITE #3: NEW AGES focuses on the renewed fascination with New Age spirituality, philosophy and aesthetics among contemporary media artists, while seeking to address the generational shifts and divides brought on by the emergence of digital technology.

September 11, 2012

I was commissioned by to create a film for the Auroratone Project at the Film POP segment of the 2012 POP Montreal Festival in Quebec. The screening is 9pm on September 21st at the Film BOX (Quartiers POP – 3450 St-Urbain, 3rd Floor).

The Auroratone Project is a commission of original short films by experimental Canadian filmmakers set to the music of POP Montreal’s 2012 participants. ‘Auroratones’ were abstract musical films used in mental institutions and army hospitals after WWII as a means of soothing post-traumatic stress disorder and general mental disturbance, invented by film enthusiast Cecil Stokes who was continuing on nearly two centuries of previous pseudo-scientific attempts to correlate colour with musical notes. For POP Montreal, filmmakers Leslie Supnet (Manitoba), Emily Pelstring (Quebec), Jon Rafman (Quebec), Alex MacKenzie (BC), Walter Forsberg (Manitoba), Leslie Bell (Alberta), Jaimz Asmundson (Manitoba), Cheryl Hann (Nova Scotia), Tamara Scherbak (Quebec), Heather Rappard (Nova Scotia) and Sabrina Ratte (Quebec) were approached to create original abstract films guided by the principles of Cecil Stokes’ Auroratones. As an added bonus, project mentor Walter Forsberg will give historical context before screening the only surviving original Auroratone, as well as Auroratone-like videos by Schtuff and actress and animator Kate Dollenmayer (Mutual Appreciation, Funny Ha Ha). - Curator, Kier-La Janisse

My film titled Scintoma is a first person perspective of myself as I make my way home from work, while suffering from a wicked migraine, and then fall into a fever induced psychaedelic dream.

About Me

Jaimz Asmundson is a Winnipeg-based media artist, working primarily in film & video and most recently in expanded cinema performance. His award-winning work has traveled to film festivals worldwide, including a retrospective and residency in Cologne, Germany and he was called "Winnipeg's enfant terrible of transgressive cinema" by Antimatter Film Festival. Jaimz is a member of the WNDX Film Festival, a past programmer of the Gimli Film Festival and he has also contributed to many award-winning shorts, features, documentaries and tv productions as a picture editor, assistant editor and graphic designer.